Ever feel like your kid calls for you an excessive number of times during the day?
Lauren Gordon did, so she decided to keep track of all the times her three-year-old son said “Hey mom” or something like it over the course of one single day. As a working from home parent of one child, she felt like he probably said this about 100 times a day, but she soon found out that was a huge underestimate.
When you hear your name called by your kid on repeat all day, it can be frustrating and make it hard to get anything done with all the constant interruptions. Gordon admits that at times, her kid calling for her on a never-ending loop made her so frustrated, she wanted to hop in the car and go scream in the Target parking lot for three minutes, and we’ve all been there. So she bought a $7 tally counter to see how many times her son called her name in a day. Her “Mom Day” started at 6:15am and by 6:24, he was up to 17 times and it didn’t slow down from there.
By the time Gordon was able to sneak into the basement to focus on work for a few hours after lunch, the count was up to 256! And in between all the “Hey moms” she worked, cooked, played, comforted, cleaned, cuddled, ran errands and more and she was frazzled. She points out that when moms complain about the mental load, this is what we’re talking about. “We mean that although we love being with our kids and pride ourselves in being their source for everything, it’s still emotionally and physically taxing to be needed so deeply,” she explains. And when she put her son to bed at 8:27pm, he finished the day at 330, which is a whole lot of individual distractions for one human to deal with.
HT: Cafe Mom